Becoming Hampton: A seafood industry

Burned to the ground by Confederate soldiers, Hampton struggled in the years after the Civil War.

It wasn't until the seafood boom began in the early 1880s that the town finally recovered, then overcame a second disastrous fire to flourish in a golden age built on crabs and oysters.

At least 15 crab packers rose from Hampton's shore, sharing the downtown waterfront with a smaller yet more profitable number of oyster houses. Crab skiffs, oyster canoes and buy boats jammed the river and creeks so tightly that you could almost stroll from bank to bank without seeing the water.

Women in white cotton caps crowded the streets every morning, walking to their jobs as pickers and shuckers on the packing room floors. Men in derbies, vests and rubber boots streamed to the waterfront, too, then shoved off in boats for a hard but generally well-paid day catching crabs or tonging oysters.

Much of that revival was due to enterprising Yankee immigrants, beginning with Irish-born James McMenamin, who left Boston to become a Norfolk court clerk in 1871. Working in his kitchen at night, he spent years perfecting a process for steaming and preserving crabmeat, then opened a small plant on the Hampton River in 1879.

Though fire wiped him out, McMenamin persevered. His second plant boasted more than 20,000 square feet of packing rooms and employed 350 people. Some 60 boats tied up at his dock, traveling out to the crabbing grounds on a tow line every morning.

Within a decade, the crab they caught was famous, winning prizes at world's fairs in Berlin, London and Paris. By the time the town adopted a new seal emblazoned with a crab in 1887, McMenamin's plant was the world's largest.

"He put the crab in 'Crabtown,'" Cobb says.

Many other packers sprang up on the busy waterfront, forming a long line between Bridge Street and what is now the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Rising from the shore at the east end was the landmark 50-foot-tall pile of shells that stamped J.S. Darling & Son as the largest oyster packer in the world.

Another Northern immigrant, Darling founded the firm in 1881 after several previous ventures faltered. Beginning with little more than a boat and tongs, he built a sprawling plant that processed 200,000 barrels of oysters a year and employed 160 shuckers.

"The thing that always impresses me in Darling's pictures are his hands," Cobb says. "This was an industrious, determined and hard-working man."

Though both the crab and oyster industries have declined dramatically, Cobb says you can still see many signs of their past wealth in the houses the seafood barons built off nearby Victoria Boulevard.

"These were the kingpins of Hampton commerce and society," he says. "And all that new money created a neighborhood of homes unlike anything that had been seen here before."